Count is admittedly ‘hit or miss,’ but still vital to help determine federal funding for shelters, programs

Down on Main Street at the crack of dawn, volunteers Sandra Perez and Irene Raigoza spotted a 62-year-old homeless woman pushing a cart filled with aluminum cans.

The woman wasn’t wearing a coat as she walked through downtown Lake Elsinore on Wednesday morning. So Perez pulled a jacket out of a pack of clothes slung over her back.

At first, the woman resisted.

“Then she paused and started crying,” Perez said.

After accepting and placing the jacket over her shoulders, she offered the young volunteers advice.

“She advised us to stay in school and not to take for granted what we have,” Raigoza said.

Raigoza, who is from Fontana, and Perez, who lives in West Covina, were among 300-some volunteers who combed streets, parks, underpasses, parking lots, river beds and encampments throughout the county Wednesday.

They were looking for homeless people — not to shoo them out of town, but to count how many they could find.

They asked basic questions of as many as would stop for what was billed as a 60-second anonymous questionnaire.

They passed out toothbrushes and bars of soap.

As 40 volunteers fanned out into the Lake Elsinore-Wildomar area from Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1580, some grabbed large bags of clothes. They were headed for known homeless camps.

“These are going to the hills,” said Denine Diaz, one of the coordinators.

It was all part of a regular survey that Riverside County conducts. The last survey was done in January 2011, when volunteers found 4,321 homeless people countywide.

The survey isn’t as precise as, say, the decennial census of the nation’s population. And the survey isn’t called a census; it’s called a “point-in-time homeless count.”

“These things are always hit and miss,” said Tim Fleming, a participant in the Lake Elsinore count and chief coordinator of earlier homeless surveys there.

Still, the surveys are viewed as crucial. And volunteers scour communities in an effort to deliver as accurate a count as possible.

Results matter because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development uses them to gauge the severity of the homeless problem in counties throughout the nation. The counts determine what amount of money is awarded to counties to fund shelters and programs that help people who don’t have roofs over their heads.

Locally, federal money makes up the bulk of funding for such programs.

As for Wednesday’s results, they will be processed and then released in April, said Jill Kowalski, a spokeswoman for the county Department of Public Social Services.

Kowalski said this year’s effort was notable, with more than 300 people helping out after 200 volunteers participated in 2011.

“It’s one of the highest turnouts we’ve had for volunteers,” she said. “The communities have all really stepped up and done a great job organizing their individual efforts. There have been a lot of giveaways.”